Pine Nuts: Please please please - picture James Brown

Related Media

INCLINE VILLAGE, Nev. - Many Nevadans have already voted. I could not do that. To me voting early would be asking to eating Thanksgiving dinner on Monday. Election Day is a day to put on your best clothes, throw out your chest in pride to be an American, and walk to the polls with a spring in your step, unless the snow is blowing sideways and leaves you clinging to a lamppost.

Not since the November 6th election of 1860 has our house been so ardently divided against itself, but at least back then we had a political party honest enough to call itself, "The Know-Nothing Party."

This coming Tuesday two hundred nations will be watching with keen interest as we decide what brand we want to put on American Democracy and foreign policy over the next four years.

The only thing that has been decided for certain at this point in a glacial campaign season is that America's ears are ringing from the constant hammering of ads and automated calls that have driven us into the floor like a shingle nail. I got a call during the 7th inning stretch of World Series Game One! That's un-American. Please, Please, Please (picture James Brown) Justice Roberts, revisit Citizens United! As an aside, I thought that stirring rendition of "God Bless America" by that Irish cop from the tenderloin was the best I ever heard.

The only issue that matters to me in this election is health care, and that includes Iran, North Korea, Syria and others at high risk such as Israel and us. The contraceptions we need to be worrying about are the centrifuge and conflagration. But let us talk about "sick care" for a moment...

People who smoke have no voice in a conversation about health care. People who drink to excess have no voice in a conversation about health care. People who eat to excess have no voice in a conversation about health care. That leaves three people in each of the 50 state who are qualified to talk about health care. If we would talk about "health" a little more, we could be talking about "care" a lot less.

Getting back to the election, I suppose a government built upon recalcitrant ideologue is somewhat better than what they have in Russia. What we saw in the recent Russian election was autocratic corrupt verses despotic repressive.

To characterize our imminent election in baseball terms during these glorious days of SF World Series afterglow, I turn to Casey at the Bat, "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." So yes, Nevada, there is still hope in Mudville...

I shall leave the last word, as I am wont to do, to Mark Twain: "It cannot be well, or safe to let the present political conditions continue indefinitely. They can be improved, and American citizenship should rouse up from its disheartenment and see that it is done."